Summer Reflections

Brian and I truly count ourselves blessed as we work in the best of both worlds: classroom teachers and consultants for teachers. Once the school year ends, we work with teachers from across the country (actually the world) during the summer, and our lives are the better for this. Here’s our list of what we noticed in our summer workshops.

1. Burnout (Brian)

Many teachers were energized and hopeful for the upcoming year, an equal amount were exhausted from cracking down on cell phones and playing the role of plagiarism police. It was an unending battle with little to show for all the effort. It is a challenge to focus on your teaching when there are so many intrusions upon the craft. Many expressed that either they lost the will to fight the battle every day, or they lost the passion for their pedagogy because policing sucked all the life out of them.

2. AI (Susan)

Like it or not, AI is here to stay and is a topic that comes up in every teacher conversation, and there are no easy answers. Across the board educators have concern over the impacts of AI not just in the classroom but its effects on student learning and brain development. I truly appreciate and respect teachers who are figuring out how to incorporate AI in the classroom; (if this is you, I highly recommend Brett Volgelsinger’s Artful AI in Writing Instruction). For me, though, I unapologetically am taking a hard pass using AI in my classroom. The parts of the class that AI makes easier – brainstorming, organizing arguments, drafting, revising, etc. – are the things I WANT my students to struggle through because it’s good for their thinking and brain development. More and more teachers – certainly not all – have the same approach.

3. Resources (Brian)

For every conference I’ve attended or spoken at, I walked away with a bevy of slide decks, Google Docs, handouts, and copies of the literature from the presenters. Who doesn’t love a free resource? With Google, ChatGPT, Teachers Pay Teachers, and Facebook groups resources are abundant. What’s scarce is time. I saw teachers overwhelmed by the resources available, and to gain control over the chaos, they wanted 2-3 reliable places to tune out all the noise.

4. The Pandemic (Susan)

Teaching through the pandemic is something that none of us care to repeat. We made adjustments when coming back from our time out (which varied greatly among teachers) giving students time to readjust to a “normal” classroom. Of course, the pandemic changed us, our students, and education – how could it not? School during that time was transactional with an emphasis on what needed to be turned in as opposed to the classroom experience as a whole, and many policies were created to accommodate this. But more and more teachers are wanting policies put in place for that specific time and circumstances removed. Teachers continually express frustration with the lack of student accountability while doubling down on teacher accountability and a desire to return to a more balanced distribution between the two.

5. Feedback (Brian)

Carol Jago, past president of NCTE, was the first podcast episode I recorded for the Talks with Teachers podcast a decade ago. She encouraged me, and all listeners, to see that teachers “are not copy editors, there to mark each mistake on the page.”

We assume that there is a correlation between the amount of feedback and student growth in writing. But I’ve found the opposite. The times when I’ve marked up an essay (on paper or a Google Doc), I’ve been demoralized to see how little students cared about the feedback. There was a glance at the grade and a quick skim of the comments. All that effort and little return. I’ve encouraged teachers this summer to change their perception of feedback. It works best when it is face-to-face in a conference because it becomes a conversation rather than a one-way transaction of comments on a page.

6. Teacher Led PD (Susan)

Whenever I facilitate a workshop, I keep a running list of ideas and resources that teachers share, and by the end of this summer, I had a full notebook. I know so many of you and how amazing you truly are, yet I continue to be blown away by how knowledgeable, creative, caring, and truly professional you are. In most cases, we don’t need more professional development; we just need more time to be together and learn from each other. Thinking about all of the money spent on speakers and companies hired to lead professional development who have no idea how a classroom truly operates makes my blood boil. Bring back the Ed Camp model of professional development!

7. Choosing Texts (Brian)

“Is there a text I can teach that isn’t offensive?”

Well, that one stumped me.

If characters in literature are complex and mirror us, how can any text teach us about humanity if it doesn’t involve human conflict? Characters fight, they bleed, they expose their vulnerability, they hide their insecurities, and they make fools of themselves. That does not make a text unteachable; it presents moments for reflection, questioning, and self discovery. We cannot sidestep the racism in Othello, the portrayal of poverty in Great Expectations, or Tom’s narcissistic violence against women in The Great Gatsby.

8. Teaching When Life Is Hard (Susan)

Yet we still get up, go to our classroom, and give our best – or at least what we can – to our students. Last year was one of those years for me; teaching while my mom’s health was declining and my teacher bff leaving the second week of school for health reasons and not returning took its toll on me. I spent a year teaching through my exhaustion, confusion, and grief. And I’m not alone. So many teachers are doing the same – whether it be personal illness, caregiving for an elderly parent, the loss of a close friend or family member, divorce, personal trauma, parenting hardships (the list can go on and on) – and they show up to their classrooms each day. I’m sure showing up to any job when life is hard is hard, but something about showing up with 32 sets of eyes on us feels harder. My encouragement is to not do this alone – ask for help both inside and outside of the classroom. Bless you if you find yourself teaching in a hard season.

9. Confidence Building (Brian)

I saw hesitation and uncertainty on the part of teachers this summer. Faces said, “Am I doing this right?” The insecurity stemmed from either self-imposed pressure or district-imposed pressure to master something on the first try. If Ernest Hemingway, a professional writer and one of the most accomplished at that craft in the 20th century, recognized that “the first draft of anything is shit,” then we need to tune out all the noise about the “easy way to,” the “quick fixes,” and the “five steps to a five.” Teachers can give themselves a great deal of grace and realize no one masters it on the first try. Excellence comes from repeated practice and slow, incremental improvement.

10. Celebrating the Non-Sexy Classroom (Susan)

I am creative by nature and tend to incorporate media, purposeful play, and manipulatives into instruction; Brian and I even wrote a book on this! HOWEVER, some days in class are stripped down to reading and writing. I initially put “just” in front of reading and writing in the prior sentence then edited it out because reading and Writing is not qualified with “just” – this is the work in an English classroom! Other activities serve as hooks, learning strategies, and confidence building activities to grow students are readers and writers, but ultimately students must read and write. There are no shortcuts. Instead of feeling less than when our lessons don’t feel TikTok or IG worthy, let’s celebrate them and ourselves for valuing the importance of reading and writing.

11. Cell Phones

Phones in the classroom are absolutely detrimental to student learning. Policies that require teaches to monistor this (put phones up front, keep phones in the bag, etc.) place a heavy burden on teachers to police and monitor the classroom. The school where I teach, Midtown High School in Atlanta, required Yondr pouches for the first time last year, and the difference in classroom engagement from day one was noticeable. Students were far less distracted and more willing to participate in classroom discussions and activities.